You and I (k.bakugo x reader)
"Is it really you?"
Katsuki's breath claws out of him weakly. It’s a hollow whisper that scratches at the cramped air. You have him pinned against his equipment, your untethered hands hovering above his clenched ones. The bite of your frosted skin seeps into the raw edges of his open knuckles. He squeezes the wood of his drumsticks so hard it sounds like rubber.
He's never seen your face this close.
Your flesh looks like wet metal and smells like the patch of grass at the edge of Katsuki's childhood backyard. The one that never seemed to dry even on the hottest summer days. Your eyes blink slowly, changing their colour with each slow pan. The curling haze of nostalgia clinging onto you makes you look older, every movement is smudged to be made antique.
You look nothing like the missing posters stapled to the rotting utility poles lining the cracked sidewalks of your shared hometown.
You cage him against the dank wall of the practice room he’s been shut in for the past hour. His eyes panic, wedging themselves between his body and the abandoned drums, only to watch your lower half phase through the metal and wood with a rumble. The instrument tightens like a zit that’s about to pop, the screws and tuning bolts are screeching.
His fear doesn’t make him run or fight. Katsuki freezes and remembers you, a version of you thawed out and warmed by the panic in his taut chest. You—the real you—and him on his basement floor, lying on your backs and drawing shapes out of the shadows. He’d gotten used to the sound of your voice in the dark, but never surrounded by so much silence. It echoed without the yell of a crowd, or the strum of your bass, or the support of Izuku’s singing, or the shred of Eiji’s guitar. It made his head hurt, soaked his palms in a sheen of sweat.
It was always so easy for you to forget that you were being watched. He remembers being jealous of that.
He kept you tucked away in the slam of his sticks or in the pounding of a pedal. If he had half the courage he thought he had, he would have asked you if it would be easy to spot him in a crowd. If you would ever be able to recognize his eyes.
Katsuki wants to spit through his teeth. A part of him needs to touch you somehow. Let it be the tears staining his cheeks, the blood caking into his nails, the sweat oozing out of his hairline and onto the arch of his nose. Let it be anything that’s never aged along with him.
You start to open your mouth. Your lips separating slowly, silently widening without that signature crack of your stressed jaw. Your throat is dark and unimaginative, like nobody bothered to build your ghost from the inside out.
You only manage two words.
“Found. You.” Wind lingers at the edge of your voice, filtering through your apparition’s gaps like pennies thrown into a dark, broken well.
The sticks choked in Katsuki’s grip clatter to the floor numbly. Like a calling bell, the sudden noise blinks you out of reality. The only sound that fills the room is his anger, it splatters all over the neutrally painted walls, replaces the blue hue of your memory. He gags, grabbing at his own throat and trying to wring out a scream trapped in a chord, but all he gets are wet heaves and the rings of his cymbals when his hunched shoulders brush against them. His grief had always been a horrible song.
He manages to crawl out of his seat and reach for his phone. He ignores the time stamp of his recording, refuses to acknowledge the red double digits, and scrolls down his short list of contacts. The last time he called you was a year ago. An entire year of believing he wasn’t looking for you anymore. His numb fingers hover over the screen, frozen in a time he wishes still existed.
Your family never even bought a gravestone.
Katsuki drops his phone back onto the floor. It’s late and he’s only seeing things he wishes he’d noticed at eighteen, in the dark of your cluttered garage the first week everyone realized you won’t be coming back this time. Katsuki quickly glances at the sticks still lying limp on the floor and tries to find any evidence of you. He finds nothing. He lets the smell of wilting cleaning products make his head dizzy.
Face up like a fish dead in the water, the phone starts to glow again. It writhers back to life with Deku’s bright and annoyingly personalized contact name. The last time he called was a week ago, just checking in, wondering which bag of cherries looked the ripest. Katsuki doesn’t feel like talking about cherries right now.
But Izuku calls a second time, because of course he does. So, Bakugo has to breathe through his nose, fast and shallow, just like you taught him.
“What?”
“Kacchan—” Izuku coughs. It doesn’t sound like him. “I need to talk to you. Kirishima’s here too.”
Eijirou mumbles a small hey, warbly at the edges, also completely unlike him. Katsuki hasn’t blinked for the entire thirty seconds this conversation has gone on for. You used to be a part of that sentence. Kirishima’s here too. You were there too. God. Fuck. He thought he was over this.
Izuku speaks again. “Are you…busy?”
“Practice,” he grunts out, swallowing down a wet sob.
They all let the answer hang in the air. Makes it feel like the wrong one.
“Okay,” Izuku breathes in, it crackles over the line, all jumpy and goosebumped.
There’s something about their hesitance, about Kirishima’s silence and Izuku’s horribly translated anxiety, that drains the last bit of his very thin patience. The room has completely flipped on its back with Katsuki still in it. He’s suddenly too aware of the lack of windows, the dull walls and their galleries of musically passionate mystery stains, his own sweat pooling at the back of his neck and between the creases of his palms. All of it is too familiar despite him being so far away from home.
When Izuku finally says your name it rings in his ears.
All he can smell is the grime in the room fermenting. It finds the darkest places in his throat and settling there to make him itch from the inside out.
He’ll never be able to leave this room, he’ll die sucking on the splintered wood of his sticks for comfort.
All because they found you. They fucking found you.
notes: thank u so much for reading! this is an au ive had in my head for a few months nowww. its something id really love to eventually make a full on fic about, but right now it's just simple bare bones. band au, haunted hometown, weird disappearances, you get it.
also,, @kissxcore ALEXIS! i hope the tag is alright. i think i remember you wanting to be when i was talking about it but again that was MONTHS ago so lmk if this was alr :)) love ya!
